The visit of Catherine at the Hazels cheered up Lettice very much; and in the delights of a little society with those of her own age, she soon forgot all her quarrels with herself; and brushed away the cobwebs which were gathering over her brain. She was enchanted, too, with the baby, and as she felt that, while Catherine was with her mother, she rather interfered with, than increased Mrs. Melwyn's enjoyment, she used to indulge herself with long walks through the beautiful surrounding country, accompanying the nurse and helping to carry the babe.
She visited several lonely places and remote cottages, where she had never been before; and began to feel a new interest given to existence when she was privileged to assist others under the pressure of that want and misery which she understood but too well. One evening she and the nurse had strayed in a new direction, and did not exactly know where they were. Very far from the house she was aware it could not be, by the time she had been absent, but they had got into one of those deep, hollow lanes, from which it is impossible to catch a glimpse of the surrounding country: those lanes so still, and so beautiful, with their broken sandy banks, covered with tufts of feathering grass, with peeping primroses and violets, and barren strawberries between; the beech and ash of the copses casting their slender branches across, and checkering the way with innumerable broken lights! While, may be, as was here the case, a long pebbly stream runs sparkling and shining upon one side of the way, forming ten thousand little pools and waterfalls as it courses along.
Charmed with the scene, Lettice could not prevail upon herself to turn back till she had pursued her way a little farther. At last a turn in the lane brought her to a lowly and lonely cottage, which stood in a place where the bank had a little receded, and the ground formed a small grassy semicircle, with the steep banks rising all around it—here stood the cottage.
It was an ancient, picturesque looking thing, built one knows not when. I have seen one such near Stony Cross in Hampshire, which the tradition of the county affirms to be the very identical cottage into which the dying William Rufus was carried, and I am half inclined to believe it.
Their deep heavy roofs, huge roof-trees, little low walls and small windows, speak of habits of life very remote from our own—and look to me as if like a heap of earth—a tumulus—such edifices might stand unchanged for tens of ages.
The cottage before us was of this description, and had probably been a woodman's hut when the surrounding country was all one huge forest. The walls were not more than five feet high, over which hung the deep and heavy roof, covered with moss, and the thatch was overlaid with a heap of black mould, which afforded plentiful nourishment to stonecrops, and various tufts of beautifully feathered grass, which waved in fantastic plumes over it. The door, the frame of which was all aslant, seemed almost buried in, and pressed down by this roof, placed in which were two of those old windows which show that the roof itself formed the upper chamber of the dwelling. A white rose bush was banded up on one side of this door; a rosemary tree upon the other; a little border with marigolds, lemon thyme and such like pot-herbs, ran round the house, which lay in a tiny plot of ground carefully cultivated as a garden. Here a very aged man, bent almost double as it would seem with the weight of years, was very languidly digging or attempting it.
The nurse was tired, so was the babe, so was Lettice. They agreed to ask the old man's leave to enter the cottage, and sit down a little, before attempting to return home.
"May we go in, good man, and rest ourselves a little while?" asked Lettice.
"Anan—"
"Will you give us leave to go in and rest ourselves a little? We are both tired with carrying the baby."